WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 07: White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro stands along the Rose Garden colonnade as he listens to a news conference between U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Mi...WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 07: White House National Trade Council Director Peter Navarro stands along the Rose Garden colonnade as he listens to a news conference between U.S. President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House June 7, 2018 in Washington, DC. Trump and Abe discussed the upcoming U.S.-North Korea summit. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)MORE LESS

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Sunday that there is a “special place in hell” for leaders like Canadian Primer Minister Justin Trudeau who, Navarro said, had engaged in “bad diplomacy.”

“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad diplomacy with president Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” Navarro told “Fox News Sunday”’s Chris Wallace. “And that’s what bad faith Justin Trudeau did with that stunt press conference.”

“That’s what weak, dishonest Justin Trudeau did, and that comes right from Air Force One.”

It was a stunning statement, and it echoed the aggression employed by White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow in a separate interview Sunday following this weekend’s G7 summit.

“Those are my words,” Navarro said later. “But they’re the sentiment that was on Air Force One after that— Look, Chris, this is just wrong what Trudeau is doing.”

Navarro said that Trudeau’s press conference following Trump’s early departure from the G7 summit on Saturday was “one of the worst political miscalculations of a Canadian leader in modern Canadian history.”

He said Trump had done Trudeau the “courtesy” of traveling to the summit when “he had other things, bigger things on his plate,” referring to Trump’s June 12 summit with North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un.

“He was even willing to sign that socialist communique,” Navarro said, referring to the joint statement of G7 nations that Trump ultimately refused to sign, and which was reportedly the result of hard-line American demands.

He called Canada’s planned retaliatory tariffs “nothing short of an attack on our political system.”

“The Canadians are totally bungling our trade relationships, and it’s due to their leadership,” he added, saying Canada was “not playing fair. Dishonest, weak.”

Wallace pressed him on the results of Trump’s aggressive trade stance: Weren’t other countries’ newly announced tariffs on American goods the opposite of what the White House wanted?

Navarro did not budge, pointing to the existing difference in import duties on automobiles in the United States and the European Union.

“On the issue of [tariffs and trade deficits] alone, we have allies strategically, but when it comes to trade disputes, these allies are basically robbing us blind,” he said. “The President is not going to put up with that.”

Matt Shuham (@mattshuham)
is a reporter in TPM’s New York office covering corruption, extremism and other beats. Prior to joining TPM, he was associate editor of The National Memo and an editorial intern at Rolling Stone.